Maintain Compliance with Effective Incident Investigation

Achieving and maintaining compliance involves adhering to industry regulations, legal standards, and internal policies that govern safe and ethical operations, either within a company or an industry as a whole. When it comes to incidents, compliance ensures that companies follow necessary laws and regulations in order to reduce the risk of incidents, and that they’re reported on properly. This is where incident investigation comes into play. In order to understand how maintaining compliance is possible through effective incident investigation, it’s important to know what compliance is and what maintaining it means.

What does maintaining compliance mean?

Compliance is the act of adhering to regulations, guidelines or laws both internally within an organisation and externally within your associated industry. It can include a wide variety of areas and sets of guidelines such as regulatory, data, privacy, and health and safety. Therefore, companies maintain compliance by using practices that help them consistently meet the standards set by these internal and external regulations.

In most medium/high-risk sectors where incident investigation is used, such as the oil and gas industry or construction, maintaining compliance primarily refers to following health and safety laws such as HSE in the UK or OSHA in the US.

How Effective Incident Investigation Helps to Maintain Compliance

When there is a risk of an incident occurring in the workplace, incident investigation is an essential part of keeping workplaces safe and compliant. The more effective the internal incident investigation process is in an organisation, the easier it is to achieve and maintain compliance with industry standards and laws.

• Effective incident investigation helps to maintain compliance by:
  Providing thorough reporting and documentation. By ensuring that all incidents are reported with details of the event, full analysis and root causes, and individuals involved including any necessary witness statements, organisations can ensure transparency for regulatory audits and internal assessments.
• Having a robust and structured investigation process, for example using a proven methodology such as TOP-SET. This ensures that the process for investigating is standardised, which achieves compliance through consistency of incident investigation approach, in documentation and meaningful results.
• Continual training and awareness. It is extremely important for new employees to receive incident investigation training, such as the Kelvin TOP-SET 1-Day Investigator Course, to ensure compliance. Similarly, refresher training to ensure the upkeep of effective practices can also help with compliance maintenance. Including incident investigation in an organisational training matrix ensures that the right people’s skills are developed to the appropriate level.

The Kelvin TOP-SET methodology is considered one of the most comprehensive methods of investigation to use and it is also applicable to any type of incident within any industry. It’s an easy to follow 6-step process that helps effectively get to the root causes of incidents, learn from them and prevent future occurrences, which in turn helps to achieve and maintain compliance in an organisation.

Compliance Checklist

• The below questions provide a jumping-off point to ensure that you’re considering all the necessary steps in an incident investigation process in order to be compliant.
• Are you following a standardised investigation process such as TOP-SET?
• Do you have a system in place for the immediate reporting of incidents i.e. an incident notification process?
• Have you safely maintained and appropriately referenced records of interviews, witness statements and incident reports for future reference and regulatory review?
• Are you able to report incidents within the required timeframes?
• Do you keep a log of reported incidents for internal and external inspections?
• Are all employees adequately trained in the investigation process and regulatory requirements?
• Is there a system for tracking the implementation of recommended actions?

Best practice also maintains that an incident management strategy is in place and routine management reviews are conducted. Reporting of incidents should be positively encouraged.

By ensuring an effective incident investigation process in your organisation, you can make sure that you stay on the right side of laws and regulations, avoiding unnecessary external investigations and legal issues. Therefore, not only is compliance maintained, but a culture of safety can be fostered and the occurrence of incidents, and risk of potential harm, can be reduced.

If you are interested in using the Kelvin TOP-SET incident investigation methodology within your organisation, get in touch with us today. Or, discover our courses that are available in Cloud Classroom format, in person and in company, depending on your requirements.